CMS released the 2018 Medicare Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) proposed rule on April 14, promising “transparency, flexibility, program simplification and innovation to transform the Medicare program” in the first IPPS rule under a new CMS and HHS administration.

Sovereign Health, a national behavioral health system, surpassed the national average performance of 50 other organizations across the country, according to data by McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School Affiliate.

“The health system has been able to break even for the first time in our history,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press. “It has been an increase in revenue to the system of somewhere between $200 million and $300 million a year for the past three years.”

Superbowl Sunday, basically a holiday in the U.S., could teach us more than how to tackle the quarterback. In an article by Forbes, Kathy Giusti and Richard G. Hamermesh, Founder of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, and Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School, explain how precision medicine can learn from the NFL.

Improving the communication and coordination of primary care and hospitals, commonly known as “vertical integration”, was found to be effective in reducing hospital readmission. In a study, published in in Medical Care, researchers analyzing the vertical integration of healthcare in Portugal led to reduced hospital readmissions for a variety of conditions.

HHS Secretary Tom Price, MD, is encouraging physicians to submit more suggestions on new Medicare payment models to move away from fee-for-service payments.

Ten infants being treated at UC Irvine Medical Center’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) have been infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, over the course of eight months, but the hospital did not report the outbreak to patients preparing to deliver babies at the facility.

HHS Secretary Tom Price and CMS Administrator Seema Verma have both expressed skepticism about making bundled payments mandatory for providers in certain regions, but switching them to voluntary participation could slow the transition to value-based care, according to five Brookings Institution experts writing in a Health Affairs blog post.